This is an original Japanese B2 theatrical poster printed for the 2004 Japanese release of Gerry / 「ジェリー」, Gus Van Sant’s austere experimental drama starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck.
Produced in 2002 and released theatrically in Japan on 18 September 2004, the film marked the beginning of Van Sant’s informal “Death Trilogy,” followed by Elephant and Last Days.
This scarce Japanese campaign design retains an almost entirely English-language layout, using pale negative space and a single desolate image to reflect the film’s radical minimalism.
Film background
Two young men, both called Gerry, drive into the wilderness and leave their car to follow an isolated trail.
What begins as a casual excursion becomes increasingly dangerous when they lose their bearings. Without food, water, or suitable equipment, the pair wander deeper into a vast and seemingly featureless landscape.
As exhaustion and dehydration take hold, their familiar conversation gives way to silence, physical collapse, and existential dread. The film strips the survival narrative to its most elemental form, observing two figures gradually overwhelmed by distance, heat, and isolation.
The screenplay was developed collaboratively by:
Gus Van Sant Matt Damon Casey Affleck
Van Sant directed the film, with Harris Savides serving as cinematographer and Dany Wolf as producer.
The principal cast consists almost entirely of:
Matt Damon Casey Affleck
Long tracking shots, extremely sparse dialogue, and vast landscape photography place the film closer to European modernist and slow cinema than a conventional Hollywood survival thriller.
The Japanese theatrical release ran approximately 103 minutes and was distributed by GAGA Communications and Elephant Picture.
Poster design
This exceptionally restrained Japanese poster is divided into broad areas of cream, misty blue, pale grey, and deep navy.
The upper half is almost completely empty. Its expansive cream field creates a palpable sense of distance and silence, mirroring the enormous physical spaces through which the characters wander.
The central image shows Matt Damon in the foreground, walking with his head lowered and a blue cloth draped over his head against the desert heat.
Far behind him stands Casey Affleck, reduced by distance to a small, isolated figure. The yellow star printed on his dark shirt provides the composition’s only vivid accent.
Their separation within the frame expresses the gradual physical and emotional disconnection at the centre of the film.
Across the middle appears the English promotional line:
“‘Elephant’, it all started from here.”
This positions Gerry for Japanese audiences as the formal and thematic starting point for the cinematic approach Van Sant later developed in his Palme d’Or-winning Elephant.
The comparison evokes the film’s combination of durational performance, monumental landscape imagery, wilderness disorientation, and existential absurdity.
The enormous title:
“GERRY”
appears at lower left in widely spaced navy sans-serif lettering.
Above it, the equally restrained billing identifies:
Casey Affleck Matt Damon Harris Savides, A.S.C. Dany Wolf Gus Van Sant
Technical and Japanese distribution information is placed discreetly at lower right, preserving the poster’s unusually generous negative space.
The result is an exceptionally refined piece of Japanese arthouse poster design, closely aligned with the film’s themes of emptiness, repetition, physical distance, and mortality.
Condition
Excellent condition. A highly attractive example retaining delicate cream and blue tones, clean photographic detail, crisp navy typography, and excellent overall display impact.
There are light fold and handling lines, together with minor creasing consistent with an original Japanese theatrical poster from this period, but these do not materially detract from the minimalist composition.
Reference: I343.
Please review the photograph carefully, as it shows the exact poster for sale.
This is an original Japanese theatrical poster from the film’s 2004 Japanese release campaign, not a reproduction or reprint.
